The 2013 MacBook Air Review (13-inch)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 24, 2013 12:01 AM ESTPCIe SSD Performance
I created a Boot Camp partition of around 120GB and ran our client iometer benchmarks to put the new PCIe SSD’s performance in perspective.
Peak random read performance is roughly comparable to the previous-generation Samsung controller. Random write performance took a bit of a hit but it's still more than fast enough for client workloads. Sequential speeds are much improved but the gains are really only visible at high queue depths. Low queue depth sequential transfers can’t be split up enough in order to really require PCIe.
What does this mean in the real world? The new SSD is definitely snappier in system use. Wake from sleep is a bit quicker, as are application launches. The funny thing is that with the exception of high-speed Thunderbolt arrays, most external sources aren’t fast enough to even stress the new storage subsystem in the MacBook Air. Large file copies confined to the drive itself benefit a bit as well. I saw roughly 300MB/s reads and 300MB/s writes when copying a large dmg from/to the MacBook Air’s PCIe SSD (compared to roughly 200/200MBps on the old Samsung SATA SSD from the rMBP15).
If you have an external Thunderbolt array with at least a couple of drives, you should have no issues matching the MBA’s internal SSD performance.
Seeing as how this is our first experience with Samsung’s PCIe SSD controller, I wanted to get a feel for how the drive behaved under extended high queue depth random writes. I ran a modified version of our IO consistency test. The test was modified to run in a 91GB space on the MBA’s Boot Camp partition. I made sure to fill the rest of the drive completely, but the random writes were effectively constrained to 91GB of LBAs. When I get back from the UK I’m going to try setting up an external boot drive and will do some more extensive testing on the drive.
The IO consistency results, at least within a somewhat constrained space actually look really good. I have a feeling that Samsung might have improved its IO consistency story with this generation, but I’ll wait on saying for sure until I’ve had a chance to do some more work with the controller. For the vast majority of users however, solid random write performance like this over a 91GB space on a full drive is actually very good news.
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abazigal - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link
It's ultimately an issue of tradeoffs. Long battery life vs High quality display. I think between the 2, more people will opt for the longer battery life (considering it is an air you are getting after all).xTRICKYxx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It shoulxTRICKYxx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It should be 1680x1050KPOM - Thursday, June 27, 2013 - link
Scaling is an issue. Apple won't change the resolution until it can go "Retina" and quadruple it. OS X wasn't designed to scale at 150% like Windows Metro. No sense making a halfway move when the output won't look good. That's probably why Windows 7 notebooks stayed at 1366x768 for so long. Windows 7 itself could scale but most Desktop applications can't.spronkey - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
To be honest, unless you go to *really* high res (i.e. "retina"), 1600x900 isn't really a large improvement on 1440x900, and anything higher than that becomes a little difficult to read without scaling, and ends up looking nasty. I personally think 1440x900 is a nice Mid-DPI resolution for these 13" machines.darwinosx - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
It is for pretty much everyone as unless you go all the way to retina you get tidy text and icons.axien86 - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Not only that, but reading that Anand got the objectively better Samsung display instead of the LG display by luck of the "lottery" is one lottery that many buyers do not win.
Secondly, Anand describes Haswell THERMAL LIMITING and how it reduces performance, but how about simple measurements of important factors like CPU, GPU, keyboard and chassis temperature under load?
At other Mac forums, users with the new Macbook Air 2013 are finding many 3D games along with Flash/HD Youtube causes loud and irritating fan noise along with rapid dramatic rise in temperature.
No review of a ultralight laptop is complete without a complete noise and temperature analysis.
Synaesthesia - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Anand's reviews are the best. The 2012 and previous models had no issues with fan noise and heat generation, nor thermal limiting. The 2013 models with Haswell have much lower power consumption and heat generation will necessarily be much lower, so I'm sure it's great too, and that thermal limiting doesn't kick in at all.Synaesthesia - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
Quoted from article: "For example, the fan was never audible on the 2013 MBA while running this test compared to running at a very noticeable volume on the 2012 Core i7 model. The same goes for temperatures. The i7 2012 model tends to run about 5% warmer along the bottom of the chassis compared to the 2013 i5."ddriver - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link
They are far too biased, but then again, so are you probably, if you find them "the best" you simply are on the same direction of bias.